The most devastating ‘Saving Private Ryan’ scene wasn’t even in the script: “I made that up on the spot”
Blockbuster-sized movies backed by a major studio and helmed by one of the industry’s marquee directors don’t tend to shoot on the fly, but Steven Spielberg decided improvisation was the best way to get the most out of Saving Private Ryan, and he was right.
Even the staggering D-Day landing sequence, which shot for almost four weeks at a cost of millions of dollars and required thousands of actors, crew members, and extras, wasn’t as meticulously planned as anyone might think, with Spielberg frequently racking up air miles by flying by the seat of his pants.
Instead of laying everything out shot by shot, storyboarding the entire film, and carrying out a perfectly laid plan, the filmmaker adopted to take a looser approach to production, or as he called it, “extraordinarily sloppy.” That’s doing him a disservice when Saving Private Ryan is a stone-cold classic, but Spielberg was feeling particularly gruesome when he came up with its most harrowing scene as he was shooting it.
Ask 100 people to name which moment from the World War II epic shocked them to their core the most, and most would answer with the devastating sequence that culminates in Adam Goldberg’s Mellish taking a knife through the heart in agonising, excruciating, and hauntingly slow fashion, especially when Jeremy Davies’ Upham is too terrified to even try and prevent his comrade from meeting their demise.
Saving Private Ryan didn’t skimp on the blood, brutality, or depicting the cost of war, but there’s something about the look in Mellish’s eyes as the life drains from his body that’s difficult to shake, and it remains as impactful now as it did back in 1998, when it left audiences stunned into silence.
When Stephen J Dubner asked Spielberg in a 1999 interview how he devised the most heart-wrenching death in Saving Private Ryan, his answer was as simple as it was surprising. “I made that up on the spot,” he said, before explaining that a straightforward case of logistics was why Mellish was selected for his grim fate.
“Believe it or not, I chose the Jewish soldier because all the other squad members were accounted for, and I’d already shot their whereabouts,” he added. Spielberg also decided at the last moment to turn the aforementioned Upham into the audience surrogate, and as much as the director believes the character is his surrogate, too, Tom Hanks had different ideas.
“I think who Steven fantasises himself being is Mellish,” the leading man suggested. “I think Steven, for his Jewishness, wants to be that guy who, when the time comes, can pop a guy in the mouth with the butt of his M1.” If Hanks is right and that really was the case, then Spielberg decided to have the character he identified with the most killed in brutal fashion, which is nothing if not unusual.
It’s an unforgettable moment in a movie full of them from start to finish, and to think, it wasn’t in any drafts of the script, and didn’t even exist until everyone was already on set shooting the scene.
